


Skin

by Parrannnah



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Art, Digital Art, Established Relationship, Fluff, Happy Ending, Love Story, M/M, Tattoo Artist Steve Rogers, Tattooed Steve Rogers, Tattoos, Weddings
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-06
Updated: 2019-05-06
Packaged: 2020-02-26 21:53:53
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,087
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18725719
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Parrannnah/pseuds/Parrannnah
Summary: Steve Rogers kept the story of his life on his skin.Anyone who wanted to know anything about him only had to look at the art he’d put permanently on his body.





	Skin

**Author's Note:**

> As always, huge thanks go out to the most wonderful Beta to ever Beta, the inimitable [Bear_shark](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Bear_shark/pseuds/Bear_shark)
> 
> Art by the spectacular [goandgetthegun!](https://www.patreon.com/posts/23102120)

Steve kept the story of his life on his skin.

Anyone who wanted to know anything about him only had to look at the art he’d put permanently on his body.

It was an ever-growing collection of things, some obvious in their meaning, some not, and some with no meaning other than he thought they looked nice.

He’d gotten his first the day after he turned eighteen; a tribute to his mother, he put a nurse rising from a rose on the back of his right arm, her initials and birthdate on the petals surrounding her. It would turn out to be the most traditional of all his tattoos, one he got before branching into the neo-traditional style more fully. But his mother had been a fairly traditional woman, who went to mass as regularly as her schedule allowed, and if she couldn’t make it to church on Sunday because she was at the hospital, she made her devotions in the chapel, rosary threaded through her fingers.

A year later he added dates to the petals, signifying her departure from this world, and he put her rosary around his wrist, the cross and the medal of Mary extending down the outside edge, trailing down the delicate bones of his hand. He wasn’t a religious man himself—couldn’t square with the idea of a God that let his people suffer as much as the world did, but his mother had said to him more than once that during every illness Steve had ever had, every time she was sure the breath in his lungs was to be his last, she had prayed, and prayed, and prayed, and Steve had always kept breathing, kept living. “God has never let me down, or given up on me,” she’d said when he’d asked why she still believed. “I will not give up on Him.”

So he tattooed this symbol of her faith onto his hand, a constant reminder that sometimes, it was okay to ask for help and to always have a little faith that help would be given.

—

His first tattoo for Bucky was done not long after the nurse for his mother, before it was augmented by those final dates, before the rosary took up permanent residence on his wrist. 

“You’re not serious,” Bucky said, eyes wide when Steve asked if it was alright.

Steve knew, in the way that someone as aware of their own mortality as Steve was, that Bucky was the Great Love of his life. He’d never wanted another, and never would, so of course he wanted that put on his body, inked as indelibly into his is skin as Bucky Barnes was into Steve’s very DNA. There was no Steve without Bucky, and it was time the outside matched the inside.

So he asked, quietly, when they were tangled in Bucky’s sheets on a rainy summer afternoon. Showed him the design he’d come up with, and knew that it would be the first of many devotions he made to James Buchanan Barnes.

Bucky went with him, the day he got it done: anemones and daffodils, both March flowers, in an alternating pattern of three, daffodil, anemone, daffodil, from the top of his shoulders where they met his neck, and trailing down to his collar bones, with two Dusty Miller leaves ending the design with their gently spiky leaves. Joyus and colorful, the yellow daffodils contrasted delightfully with the bright-white anemones, and the silvery-gray Dusty Miller added a beautiful finality to the vivid flowers.

“Why three flowers and then the leaves?” his artist, Clint, asked him. They were becoming friends, after a fashion. Clint had done Steve’s other tattoo, and as Steve started to get deeper into the culture they saw more of each other. “I don’t disagree with you on it, clearly. They fit the space perfectly. Just wondering if there was a reason behind it.”

Steve smiled, laid out on the warm leather of the table in Clint’s space at his shop, the late afternoon sunlight warm where it landed on his bare stomach. He turned his head and looked at Bucky, squeezing his hand to get his attention before he answered. “They’re all March flowers,” he said, eyes focused on the beautiful face of his love. “And with five on each side, it’s ten total.”

Steve saw the moment it sank in for Bucky, the significance of the design hitting him fully. Steve was commemorating the best day in the history of his world: The day Bucky Barnes had come into it.

—

Bucky joined the Army after Steve graduated. Desperately wanting to go to college, but knowing his parents couldn’t afford to send him, that he couldn’t get enough money in scholarships, and that he was beyond reluctant to take out the tens of thousands of dollars he would need in student loans, Bucky did what he felt was his best option.

A recruiter explained the Post 9/11 GI Bill to Bucky, and he figured he could manage four or so years of Active Duty if it could send him to college.

Steve was angry and depressed by turns, knowing full well that Bucky was going someplace that Steve couldn’t follow. Bucky was scheduled to leave for boot camp in January, wanting to spend Hanukkah with his family and Christmas with Steve and his mother.

Steve’s Christmas present to himself, done two nights before Bucky was due at MEPS, was a bright bouquet of forget-me-nots on his ribs, held by Bucky’s hand. 

He didn’t tell Bucky, just let him find it later when he took Steve to bed in his attic bedroom at his parent’s house, the gentle sound of snow rushing past the window and the neighbors Christmas lights twinkling beyond the old glass.

Bucky undressed Steve slowly, taking his time as he had been wont to of late, savoring every second they were together as they grew closer to their separation.

“What’s this?” Bucky murmured, hands skating gently along the large square of saran wrap covering Steve’s ribs, kneeling down to get eye level with the blurry image beneath, trying to make it out underneath the wrinkled plastic wrap and a protective smear of Aquaphor.

“Forget-me-nots,” Steve breathed, hand coming down to cup Bucky’s jaw, the other stretched out to brace himself on the bedpost. Bucky looked up at him, eyes bright with love and devotion and awe, and Steve knew it was reflected in kind in his own. 

—

The reaper went low on his left side after his bout with pneumonia the winter he was nineteen when he almost lost that particular fight. Holding his scythe, a banner around him saying “Only Death Is Sure,” he surrounded it with tally marks, one for every time his old friend Death had almost won their battle and taken Steve from this world. Between the childhood illnesses, the fights, the heart problems, and his yearly bought with pneumonia and/or bronchitis, there were twenty-two marks altogether, far more than made Bucky comfortable to remember. But he knew that Steve and Death had an odd relationship, one born of long familiarity, so he kept his feelings on that tattoo to himself.

—

Steve got a handful of tattoos during the spring, all little things that he placed wherever he liked. His favorite being the one on his back, an upside-down horseshoe with a thirteen in the middle at the shops Friday the Thirteenth Event.

“Seems like you’re inviting bad luck, sweetheart,” Bucky said, face blurry and expressions slow on the FaceTime screen of Steve’s iPad. Bucky was somewhere undisclosed—training, he said—far away from everything and everyone. Steve missed him more than he could put into words.

“Not inviting it,” Steve said, keeping his shirt off and not ashamed. Bucky’s eyes were drawn as always to the flowers on Steve’s collarbones, the first part of Bucky he’d ever inked on his skin. “Making peace with it. You’ve gotta admit, I’ve had my fare share. Maybe this will balance things out.”

The shop manager of Hawkeyes left three weeks later, and when Steve went in to get a piece started on his left forearm, Clint casually asked if he wanted the job. 

Steve, of course, said yes.

—

By the time Bucky came home on leave, Steve had put more of him on his skin.

Swallows, this time, those birds that always returned home, resting with outstretched wings down by his hip bones, a banner held between their beaks stretching low across his belly, proclaiming “Till the End of the Line” in bold script.

Clint’s coworker, Sam, had done those, as Clint let Steve know that Sam did the best script in the shop, and had a special affinity for all bird tattoos. They had turned out beautifully, the colors bright and vibrant in the way that the neo-traditional style, and Steve, favored.

When Bucky found them as he undressed Steve later, he placed kisses all over them and their sentiment, eyes misty and bright with unshed tears.

—

Over the next few months, as Bucky went to training after training after training, crisscrossing time zones and state lines alike, Steve started doing more and more around the shop and adding more and more ink to his collection.

A visiting artist, Peggy Carter from a shop in London called  _ Shield, Ink _ , was the next person to put color in his skin.

“Oh, hello,” she had said to him on her first day in the shop, grabbing his hands as he restocked everyone’s supplies. “Look at these!” She’d looked him in the eye, smiling hugely and making her septum ring glint in the bright shop lights. “Your hands are perfect. I would love to tattoo them.”

Steve had stood in the hallway outside the private rooms, flabbergasted, until Natasha, co-owner, part-time tattooer, and resident piercer, came looking for him.

“Oh, that’s just Peggy,” she’d explained as she helped Steve finish up. “She’s always like that.”

Steve and Peggy ended up striking up a fast and deep friendship, and as he saw her work he decided to let her put her mark on him--a big Tudor rose on the back of his hand.

—

Surprising no one, Steve eventually started to apprentice with Clint.

Steve had gotten tattooed by everyone in the shop by this point, along with most of the people from their “sister-shop” across town, Valkyries, which was owned by a very intimidating woman of the same name and operated by women only, which Steve thought was amazing.

He started just after his twentieth birthday, having worked up the guts to finally ask Clint after the party thrown for him by his friends and Bucky, who was home on pre-deployment leave.

“Of course, Steve!” Clint grinned, throwing his arms around Steve in one of his signature bear hugs, and Steve felt like he was ten feet tall.

—

As the years passed, the story on Steve’s skin added chapter after chapter. Some had deep meanings, some were amusing, and some were just pretty.

The figure he put on his arm was all three.

“Steven Grant! I cannot believe you did that!”

“Aw, c’mon, Buck! You look great!”

They had just gotten home from the airport, in the little one-bedroom they’d picked out two of Bucky’s trips home ago. It was Bucky’s official home of record, and he used some of his housing allowance to pay for it, even though it drove Steve a little crazy.

It was October, and in deference to the chill in the air, Steve had been wearing long sleeves when he picked Bucky up. They’d gotten hot and heavy as soon as they walked in the door, and Bucky had stripped Steve out of his shirt right quick, but it wasn’t until he had Steve’s hands pinned to the wall above his head that he noticed Steve’s newest piece: A little Bucky, teeny tiny shorts the only thing he was wearing, standing on his tiptoes in a classic pinup pose.

Bucky acted as though he hated it, as though it was his least favorite of all the tattoos Steve had for him, which was saying something since he’d been damn near speechless when Steve had tattooed Bucky’s gray-blue eyes on his elbows.

But Steve knew what Bucky actually thought of them. He felt the way Bucky trailed his fingers down it when they were tangled up in each other, sweaty and stuck together as they poured out their love for each other in the small hours of the morning, wrapped in their sheets and each other, the scent of both heavy in the air. He saw the way Bucky tried to hide the smile at the corner of his mouth when he caught sight of it, or when he saw Steve run his hand over it thoughtlessly, the way he did several times a day, whenever Bucky crossed his mind.

—

Clint required a lot from his apprentices. New York had fairly easy requirements to become a licensed tattoo artist, but Clint had been trained in Massachusetts, whose Department of Health oversaw the licensing criteria, and Clint adhered to their prescribed regulations. needs. By the time Clint was ready to turn Steve loose, he had done 75 hours of direct observation, 75 hours of workstation clean-up and workstation preparation, 450 pieces and over 2,000 hours inking tattoos various sizes, colors, and difficulty levels.

Clint was meticulous in his record keeping, had a little checksheet and everything for all the steps Steve mastered, not just related to the art side, but to the health side as well. Steve was forever grateful his Ma had been a nurse, because he had an easier time with the proper sterilization, cleaning, disposal, and emergency procedures than most.

The day Steve’s license came in the mail, the shop crew and all his friends managed to pull together a huge party, and Clint officially offered him one of the full-times spots in the shop.

Steve had never smiled so much in life, until the next day when Bucky walked through the doors and made an appointment to get his very first tattoo.

Nothing could express how much it meant to either of them that the very first person Steve tattooed as a Professional Tattoo Artist, not just an apprentice, was the love of his life.

Because Bucky was the biggest romantic anyone had ever met, he asked Steve if they could match.

Bucky put Steve’s swallows and their banner across his shoulders.

—

Bucky ended up doing four deployments, three duty stations, and six years in the Army.

The day he came home, his meager household goods held in the three boxes he’d brought with him, Steve asked him to marry him.

—

Steve was sitting in his space at Hawkeyes, shirt off and laying on the table while Sam prepped his side.

“You ready, man?” Sam asked, checking his station one more time. 

“Always,” Steve smiled back, the familiar buzz of the machine starting up. 

Steve hadn’t altered or changed any tattoos since he’d gotten them, beyond getting color touch-ups here and there, but the hand holding his forget-me-nots needed updating.

He’d gotten his dad’s wedding ring resized, and the gold band would be resting on Bucky’s hand in real life this time tomorrow, so it seemed only fitting that it goes on Bucky’s hand on Steve’s body, too. Steve was never sure if Bucky had realized that the hand Steve had drawn all those years ago was, in fact, Bucky’s, but he’d find out soon.

—

[](https://www.flickr.com/photos/160931217@N08/46867807255/in/dateposted-public/)

They got married on a Saturday in April at the Greenpoint Loft, an old rope factory turned into a wedding venue that they had loved on sight.

They walked down the aisle together, hands clasped and grins bright.

Clint was officiating, eyes already a little damp around the edges. Neither of them had a Best Anyone, just a few grooms-people each. Sam, Natasha, and Peggy on Steve’s side, the latter of whom had become one of Steve’s closest friends since that long-ago day she’d tattooed his hand. Bucky’s sister Becca and his two Army buddies Tim Dugan and Gabe Jones stood up for him.

The ceremony itself was short and sweet, neither of them wanting anything long and drawn out. They both wept through the vows, their own and each other’s, but so did Clint and almost everyone attending. Steve brought Bucky’s hand up for a kiss before sliding Joseph Rogers old ring onto his finger.

“With this ring, I thee wed,” Steve murmured, eyes stinging as he fought to keep the tears at bay for a moment. He cracked a cheeky smile before adding, “Finally.”

Bucky laughed, whispered “Punk,” at him before turning to Becca, who held a braided gold band in her hand, the metal thin as per Steve’s request. Bucky lifted Steve’s hand, their eyes locked together as Bucky repeated the vow. “With this ring,” he started, glancing down to start the slow slide of the band onto Steve’s finger.

Steve knew the moment Bucky saw them, the flowing black lines stark against Steve’s forever-fair skin. 

_ JB _

Steve had done them a week ago when Bucky had gone to his parents since the one tradition he wanted to uphold was not seeing each other right before the wedding.

Steve had, over all these years, kept his knuckles bare, for all he’d filled up most available real estate on his body with the brightly colored story of his life.

Bucky looked up, jaw dropped, and laughed a little breathlessly. “Of course you did,” he breathed, leaning down to press a kiss of his own to his initials on Steve’s ring finger.

Steve squeezed his hand, knew the love light in his eyes was blinding in its intensity. “Course I did.”

Clint cleared his throat quietly, rather more misty-eyed than he had been a minute ago, and nodded to the ring still in Bucky’s hand.

Bucky readjusted his hold on Steve’s left hand. “Right, right. Uh, with this ring, I thee wed.”

The band slid into place at the bottom of Steve’s finger, the metal thin enough that the letters on his hand were unobstructed, which had of course been the plan.

Steve and Bucky held both hands again, facing each other as Clint wiped his eyes and sniffed for a moment before taking a deep breath. “By the power vested in me by the Internet, I now pronounce you married!”

Steve and Bucky grinned, standing still.

“Well, what are you waiting for? Seal this deal with a kiss!”

So they did.

**Author's Note:**

> Tattoos Not shown in Fic:
> 
> Gimli: Gimili is Steve’s favorite, because he is Small and Fight-y with a good heart, just like Steve  
> Chest Piece: Lady Justice, as depicted with Blindfold, Scales, and Sword. Banner says “I’ll Get What I Deserve”. Steve firmly believes that by doing and fighting for what is right, and good and just, he will, in the end, get what he deserves, such as love and happiness and worthwhile life.  
> Eyes on Elbows: Bucky’s eyes watching Steve’s back, same as Bucky’s always done.  
> Art Supplies: Steve’s first creative love, and a tribute to his lifelong passion for art in all its forms  
> Brooklyn: Self Explanatory. Steve will always rep his hometown hard  
> Star on his shoulder: Nautical star, classic tattoo design represents a traveler or sailor's way home whenever they were lost in life or travel.  
> Heart and dagger: He wears his heart on his sleeve, and his heart is Bucky
> 
> ————————————————————————
> 
> I’m now on [Twitter!](https://twitter.com/KatAtomic2/) Things are weird and wonderful over on Fandom Twitter so come hang out! I’m also still on [Tumblr!](https://kat-atomic.tumblr.com/) so come hang out!


End file.
